Monday, 28 May 2012

Although the assets are all the ingame models, it has been pre-rendered and it doesn't show gameplay. I am leaving that for the next video. This one just explains the atmosphere and how I feel about space.

I think that watching the video you will understand what you can expect from me and my game. I hope you like it.

Sunday, 27 May 2012

Finally the trailer is completed. I will be sending it to a few websites and "hopefully" I am sure they will like it enough to feature it.

On a different note, the help manual is quite on the way. I am afraid it is going to be a required read if you want to know how to play the game but I am trying to make it as simple and pretty as possible. It will be a few pages with the old "NASA document" look.

I don't know how you fell about it but ages ago when the flight sims had a manual the size of a book,to me it was almost as fun to read the manual as it was to play the game. I am going for a simplified version of that...

Tuesday, 22 May 2012

I have been very busy rendering. The renders were taking ages. I didn't know why such simple scenes would take so long to render.

I had some inspiration and looked at the light. It had a radius of 20 kilometers and was rendering shadows. That made every frame take about 30 seconds to render. 30 seconds is not long for a single frame but when a scene has 1200 frames it can add to a bit of waiting time.

If you are working on it all day it might not be a problem but when you do it on your own time in exchange for sleeping time...not sucha good idea.

Anyway I reduced the size of the light to just match the objects in the scene and not it renders in ranges from 0 to 2 seconds....quite faster.

Thursday, 17 May 2012

I couldn't stop my self from posting another shot of the teaser trailer....I am so excited about it....hehe

The teaser trailer is rendered but uses only ingame assets. That is why some of the resolution is a bit low for close ups.

The other side of this is that, if they are kind of good enough to do a video of this size, imagine the detail that comes through in a platform with a screen size like the iPhone, iPod touch.

I have edited the post to add smaller images. I think that static they don't look as good as when moving so I don't want you to be disappointed right now. In exchange for the resolution I throw in an extra image.

Wednesday, 16 May 2012

I have finally fixed a bug that stopped me from locking and unlocking the missions. That is sorted now and that was basically the biggest issue left.

I am polishing now the game Menu and sounds.

I am also working on the teaser trailer that will anounce the gameplay trailer release date....(did you see what I did there?). I am quite sure you will like the idea behind the trailer. Watch this space.

I have been receiving quite a positive reaction in many forums so thank you to all the people that made those comments.

Here is a sample shot of the trailer: I won't post more of this until is finished as I could spoil the surprise behind it.

Finally the gameplay has been locked down.....well almost. I have to tweak waypoints in two missions... 10 minutes job...but the code is finished and won't touch it anymore before any possible update after release.

I have now to finish a few code things on the Frontend Menu and that should be it. It is getting quite close to be game completed.

I am currently making a few art assets to finally show the game to the world.

Tuesday, 8 May 2012

I have been busy making the mission waypoints and other similar things. I have also found the final music that I will be using for the game. I have licensed it only for web use as I will only be making youtube videos at the moment. Once I complete the game and I am about to publish it I will extend the license.

Overall it is looking quite good. I have also made a change to the camera movement that I had in my mind for quite some time. It didn't take me too long to code considering I have been texturing and not coding for so long.

I have also fixed an evil bug that I had for ages where the first repair waypoint was repeated.

Also I was quite concern because the framerate had drop quite considerably since I imported the new models and texture to the game and thought it had something to do with the new Earth.

Surprisingly the issue happened only when looking at the space crafts.... That got me thinking and I realised that the issue had to do with the lighting.

I had created a template material that I duplicated to use in each object just by replacing the diffuse texture. By mistake I had applied per pixel lighting instead of per vertex.

Once the issue was fixed the frame rate went up again and the panic was gone.

After a scary moment when I couldn't export to the iPhone due to a iOS version incompatibility I have managed to solve the problem and I now have all the assets in game.

I had only seen them while I was working them in 3d and in the middleware but seeing them in the final screen with the retina display....they look amazing...I was surprised how good they look

To be honest I should be quite tired of seeing them by now but I can't stop smiling when I run the game and look at them.

The new Earth has also made a massive difference...

Hopefully I would have ironed all the waypoint nodes and other stuff by the end of the weekend and might start taking video captures late next week. There are a few camera code tweaks I want to do before I take those captures.

Wednesday, 2 May 2012

Finally I have all models ingame. I also redeveloped the Earth and baked its new textures, put them in game and I think they look great. Unfortunatelly it all is just in the middleware build.

I exported the build and converted it to iOS for the iphone but when I was going to replace my old iphone build with the new one that has all the new models and textures.... my Xcode tools were out of date and my iPod had been updated and thus not supported so... I will have to download the latest Xcode today and try again tonight.